Episode 117: Welcome back to Real Health Radio. We have another guest interview and this week I’m sitting down with Andrea Owen.
Andrea is an author, mentor, and certified life coach who helps high-achieving women let go of perfectionism, control, and isolation and helps them choose courage and confidence instead. She’s helped thousands of women to manage their inner critic to create loving connections and live their most kick-ass life.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 117 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/117.
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Before I jump into this episode, I have an ask for you guys. A couple of times a year, I take on clients, and client work is the core of my business. It’s how I spend the vast majority of my time. After working with clients for the last decade, I feel confident in saying I’m very good at what I do. Yes, I help clients with various symptoms, but it’s actually much bigger than just removing symptoms. These are struggles that these individuals are obsessed with and defined by. Their problem has become how they identify and think about themselves.
My clients have often worked with multiple practitioners and are on the verge of giving up. It really isn’t uncommon for me to be the fourth or the fifth or the sixth person they’ve come to. Where I see myself being different to others is by combining science and compassion. I’m evidence-based in what I do and have a strong grounding in physiology and why the body is functioning how it is, but at the same time, I’m compassionate. I listen to the mental and emotional side of the client’s experience, and I know that these aspects are of equal importance of health as the physical side is.
One of the aspects I like most about the work that I do is how positive the process is. People believe that they’re going to have to give up so much, that it will be painful in so many ways, but they’ll convince themselves that it’s better for their long-term health. But what they find is that the changes actually add to the quality of their life. They enjoy the changes in their new life. Their physical, mental, and emotional health improves now, not in some far-off distant time in the future.
After working together, my clients regain what they thought was impossible – having their period again, conceiving, feeling energised, purposeful, alive, and walking by a mirror without the dread of seeing their own reflection.
I only have a few slots left and I’m nearing the end of taking on clients. I put out so much free material – the podcast is free, the blog posts are free. While the free material I put out, I stand behind, it is much more general. You have to discern what is and isn’t relevant for you. But when we are working together, I’m the one who can sort through this and show you what is important, what is the low-hanging fruit, what are the levers that will make the most difference.
If you want this kind of precision in helping you recover your health, now is your chance to work with me. If you’re interested in finding out more, head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read more about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat.
Welcome to Real Health Radio: health advice that’s more than just about how you look. And here’s your host, Chris Sandel.
Welcome back to Real Health Radio. This week, it is a guest episode, and my guest today is Andrea Owen. Andrea is an author, a mentor, and certified life coach who helps high-achieving women let go of perfectionism, control, and isolation and choose courage and confidence instead. She’s helped thousands of women manage their inner critic to create loving connections and live their most kick-ass life.
This is actually the second time that Andrea’s come on the podcast. She has a new book out, so I wanted to invite her back on so that we could chat about this. Andrea is someone whose work I personally really enjoy, and she’s someone I regularly recommend to my clients for them to check out, and they become fans of her books and her podcasts. I’ve had clients who’ve ended up working directly with Andrea.
As part of this episode, we cover a lot. We talk about noticing and naming your feelings and your behaviours. We talk about certain thoughts or behaviours like isolating or imposter syndrome or catastrophising. We go through what these are, why they occur, and what are some of the ways people can deal with them. We also talk about values and why understanding your own can be so important.
Andrea is certified as a Daring Way Facilitator, which is training based on the research of Brene Brown. So if you enjoy Brene Brown’s work, you’re going to really love this episode. I loved this chat with Andrea. She’s incredibly bubbly and super easy to have a conversation with, and I think we covered a lot of ground. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Andrea Owen.
Andrea, welcome back to Real Health Radio.
Andrea Owen: Oh, thank you for having me. I wasn’t sure we were recording yet. [laughs] It’s early in the morning over here in the States.
Chris Sandel: That’s okay. This is the second time you are appearing on the show, and the first episode we did back in 2016, right at the beginning of 2016, so over two years ago. During that chat, I was very new to podcasting and interviewing, so hopefully you notice some big seismic difference in my abilities now versus then.
Andrea Owen: Oh, I’m sure you’re being too hard on yourself.
Chris Sandel: I highly recommend people go and check out that first episode we did. It’s Episode 28, and I’m going to link to it in the show notes.
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So rather than covering your backstory in detail, which we did last time, do you want to give a brief description of who you are, what you do?
Andrea Owen: Yeah. During the day, I am a life coach and mentor for women. I’m also a podcaster, as you are, and an author of two books. I’m also a mom, and I just recently got back into triathlons. Let’s see, that about covers it. That’s right in the forefront of my mind right now. And dog mom as well. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Nice. You mentioned two books there. The most recent book, How to Stop Feeling Like Shit: 14 Habits That Are Holding You Back From Happiness – this is actually what I want to chat about with you today. You sent me a copy of the book, which I read and I thoroughly enjoyed. I’m going to use that book, as well as your podcast, which I listen to regularly, as the basis of this conversation.
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I want to dig into some of the sections of the book in more detail, but starting more broadly, what was your reason for writing the book?
Andrea Owen: It’s funny; after I wrote my first book – I think it’s similar to having a child when you have a really hard new-born and somebody is like, ‘So when are you going to have another baby?’ As you can probably attest to, Chris, you’re like ‘Probably never’. [laughs] That’s how I felt when I wrote my first book, mostly because I felt like I put everything I had into that book.
As I’ve heard other authors say, we don’t find books; books find us. So I just sort of surrendered and let the universe plop anything into my lap that it felt like, and that’s really what happened.
What also happened was I became really curious and paid close attention to not only the things that were happening in my life, but the patterns I was seeing in my clients over and over again. I’ve been at it now for 10 or so years, so I really started to notice some similarities in a lot of my clients. That’s where the list of 14 habits came together.
Chris Sandel: As a regular listener to your podcast, there was a lot of that that I could see within the book. I could see that these are obviously the things that are most important with your clients, because they’re the things you talk about the most, so that’s why they made it into the book.
Andrea Owen: Exactly.
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Chris Sandel: One of the things that comes up a lot, one of the common ideas, is about noticing and naming – paying attention to these negative habits and then calling them by their appropriate name. Are you able to talk about this and why this is important?
Andrea Owen: Yeah, and I’m actually glad you brought that up. What I want the win to be for people is – quick side note here – I don’t want this to be a book like ‘Hey, Chris, here’s the 14 things you’re doing wrong. You need to fix these and then you’re going to be happy’. I don’t want that to be the case at all. These are habits that I still do, that you probably still do.
So the win is that you start paying attention, like you just said, and notice when they’re happening in your life so you can get curious about them, hopefully have some self-compassion along the way, and choose other behaviours that I talk about in the book that are more in alignment with the person that you want to be. That right there is a huge, huge win. Not eradicating all of the behaviours from your life.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. You talk about this difficult path that people need to get right where it’s that balance between noticing these things and then overidentification or even creating pathologies with normal coping skills.
Andrea Owen: [laughs] Right. Those people listening, raise your hand if you’ve ever picked apart all of the behaviours that you’re doing or sat there and wondered, ‘Is this co-dependence? Or is this just healthy boundaries?’ Like I mentioned in the book, there’s actually a term for that, and it’s called overidentification.
I work with a lot of really smart women, which I’m sure you do too, who tend to really get lost in their own thoughts. So yeah, just be careful for that because that could happen. I feel like it’s a distraction sometimes. I’ll have a client who’s trying to label it. ‘Is it this? Am I doing this? Do you think I’m doing this?’ Sometimes I’m like, just throw your hands up in the air and say ‘I don’t know’. The only thing that really matters is, does it feel good or is it feeling like shit? If it’s feeling like shit, then let’s work on something else to change it.
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Chris Sandel: Let’s go through some of the habits that you talk about. The first one I would like to chat about is isolating. Can you explain what this is and what it would look like?
Andrea Owen: The way I describe it in the book and when I see it a lot in my community and my clients is not necessarily you get home from work and it’s been just a tiring day, and you want to just watch a couple hours of Netflix and have dinner on the couch and that’s it. That’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about when something really hard happens, when you have a new-born baby or you got reprimanded at work or you’re going through a breakup and you think about reaching out and you hear yourself saying, ‘I don’t want to reach out to Jennifer because she’s busy at work too’ or you’re embarrassed that you dropped the ball at work and you got reprimanded for it or you don’t want to feel like a burden to other people. So you tell yourself, ‘I can do this on my own. I can handle it. I’m just going to soldier on. I got through it last time’.
This becomes a pattern and a habit of needing to connect with someone, needing that support, because as humans we are meant to actually live in community. We don’t anymore, but even more so, we are isolating with even just picking up the phone and calling people or trying to meet for coffee to talk about the hard stuff. That’s the kind of isolation that I’m talking about – not reaching out for help when you do actually need it.
Chris Sandel: That was one of the things I really liked. You made that distinction, and I’m going to quote you. You said ‘Isolation and hiding out aren’t physical acts as much as they are emotional ones. These women hide their insecurities and isolate their struggles, but they’re often outgoing, sociable women, and if you met them, you’d think they had a great life’.
Andrea Owen: Yeah, and that they were social and they did see their friends. But it’s like, are you just talking about surface topics? Are you overriding things – like when someone says ‘How’s work going?’, you just don’t tell them what happened. Or sometimes you do and it’s like two years later. Someone’s like, ‘Why didn’t you tell me that that happened? You went through it on your own?’ That’s what I’m talking about.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. The reason I think the distinction is helpful is otherwise people think, ‘Well, I don’t really do that. I’m a sociable person. I chat with people’. But what you’re saying is you chat with people, but it’s not about the real things that you should be chatting about or that you want to be dealing with.
Andrea Owen: Right. I also want to make the distinction, too – this is not about sharing all of your dirty laundry on social media. I think people see other people doing that – I do that sometimes. I’ve been very outspoken and public with the grief of losing my father about a year and a half ago. But that’s not for everyone, and I do my own personal grief, the real, real, real work and the real grief, with the people I’m closest to. So I’m not saying that’s what you need to do either and air out all your stuff on social media. It’s these close relationships.
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Chris Sandel: Can you give some tips for how to deal with isolating?
Andrea Owen: I think the first one is – and I refer to this person or these people in your life as your compassion witnesses. These are people who, as our fairy godmother Dr Brene Brown likes to say, have earned the right to hear your story. These are people whom we’ve established trust with over time, we have intentionally nurtured the relationship – and if you haven’t done that, that’s going to be your first step.
For a lot of people, it’s not about finding brand new friends to start these new healthy relationships with; sometimes it’s a matter of having a conversation with somebody that you’re already friends with. I have clients pretty regularly who I’ve given the challenge or homework assignment, whatever you want to call it, where they either have to clean something up with a friend that happened a while back or re-establish what they want from the relationship.
This is not easy to do. Many of us are parents of small children or our career has become number one and we work a lot of hours or it’s just very painfully awkward and uncomfortable for us to even have that conversation. But trust is built in small increments over time, and we have to sometimes have that initial conversation of ‘Hey, this is how I would love to show up in our friendship’, and maybe you’ve messed it up and need to clean it up, ‘and this is what I would love for this friendship going forward’.
A lot of times we do this in our intimate relationships with our romantic partners, but we don’t do it in our friendships. So I would love for people to start getting in the practice of doing that. And it’s not an easy conversation. It’s awkward for me too. But it’s necessary in having that connection that you actually need to feel better.
Chris Sandel: I think you talked about it in this section of the book, and it came up probably a number of times, but you talked about having conversations where you ask people for what you need, which I don’t think a lot of people do or a lot of people do outside of their romantic relationships, or even within romantic relationships. But I think it’s a really helpful bit of advice.
Andrea Owen: Gosh, wouldn’t it be so amazing if we just set that as the welcome mat, if you will, of our relationships? I think that you nailed it, Chris. I think most people don’t do it in any relationship.
What that actually looks like is, for instance, I do this most regularly with my husband because – and I don’t mean to stereotype, but I’m going to do it anyway for a second – men typically like to take care of their partners, and what that looks like is they like to fix it.
Chris Sandel: Agreed. [laughs]
Andrea Owen: Okay, thank you. Sometimes it’s very black or white. They’re presented with a problem and they immediately look for a solution. It makes so much sense. [laughs] Why wouldn’t you look for a solution to this problem? My husband is very much the problem-solver, and he really enjoys it. So when I present him with something that’s hard that’s come up with work or really anything – parenting, whatever – his brain will immediately start looking for a solution, and then his mouth starts telling me about the said solutions.
Then I proceed to get very frustrated because that’s not what I need. I need him to just listen and be there with me while I’m going through this. If I wanted a solution, I would’ve asked for it. It’s not fair for me to get angry and resentful at him because how is he supposed to know?
So what I have learned is to preface the conversation and say, ‘All right, I’m about to share something with you that happened today, and all I need you to do is listen and just hear me out’. Now he knows that that’s code for ‘put your phone down, look me in the face, and just listen’. I hate this word, but I’m going to say it – I’ve kind of had to train him. And he appreciates it so much because he wants to show up for me as best he can. He wants to make me happy. It’s still a little bit uncomfortable for him because he’s honest and he’s like, ‘I still don’t know why you don’t want me to help you fix it’. So he’s still kind of coming around.
But that was really put to the test when my dad died and he’s watching me go through this and he’s just sitting on his hands like ‘What do I do?’ He had to call my friends and say, ‘I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do’. God bless him. But that was a huge lesson for both of us, and me having to say ‘Here’s what I need from you. Here’s how you can show up best for me’.
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Chris Sandel: You referenced your dad passing away twice, and I’ve read different posts you’ve put out on it and I’ve heard different podcasts you’ve talked about it. There was something that came up in the book where you were talking about your thoughts around whether to show emotions in front of children. Are we meant to be putting on a brave face and not letting them see us upset? I’d love to hear how your thoughts around all of this have evolved because of that process.
Andrea Owen: It was really interesting. My dad died when I was writing that book, so it was very front and centre for me. I don’t know what kind of family you grew up in; I’m assuming it was similar to mine, especially given your culture. [laughs] We did not have a lot of space for the ‘heavier’ emotions. I often half-joke that we had one emotion in our family and that was happiness, and if you had any other ones, you needed to just go do that in your room, and when you were done you could come out and join us.
It wasn’t anything that was explicitly said, but it was a message that was I think very clear. I rarely saw my parents cry, and when they did, I distinctly remember the times that they did, and it was for tragedies that had happened to family members and friends, and it was terrifying. No one talked to me about it. There was no conversation about grief or death or dying or any of those big things. It just was not said.
So I grew up – I call it emotional illiteracy. Emotions scared me, basically. I’ll just leave it at that. When I had my own children, I knew on a conscious level I wanted to raise them differently, but I had no idea what that was going to look like. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: And probably without the skillset of like ‘how do I even make that work?’
Andrea Owen: How do I make that work? I know what I don’t want, but what I do want, I’m not really sure what that looks like.
Luckily, I have the honour of being friends with people who are experts in that area, and what I know now that is helpful is a couple of things. I know you probably have a lot of parents listening.
One thing is I never make my children wrong for their feelings. A clear message that I articulate on a fairly regular basis – my children can probably articulate it back to you – is this: you are never wrong for whatever you feel; you’re even allowed to be mad at me. But what you are responsible for is how you behave around those feelings. In other words, you can’t be nasty to me. I don’t like slamming doors. Those types of things. And if you do do that – which sometimes the emotions get the best of us – you need to clean it up. And they know what that means. That means apologising, etc.
That in and of itself I think is huge, because I never got that lesson. But the biggest thing is I don’t want my kids to feel like they’re wrong. If you’re scared, you’re scared. If you’re sad, I might not think that that’s something to be sad over – that you didn’t get the present you wanted. Trust me, I have a hard time with that sometimes. [laughs] But I do my best to let them feel whatever they feel. I think that is especially an important lesson for boys.
The other thing is, as an adult, expressing emotions in front of children. I do cry in front of my children, but if I’m having a full-on meltdown, that is not something that I would probably do in front of them. That is something I would save for my husband or my best friend. Or my therapist. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: I’ve now got a six-month-old, so this is a space I’m starting to try and navigate around, start to read around, to work out how to deal with all of this stuff.
Andrea Owen: It’s fun. [laughs]
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Chris Sandel: The other thing you said from the book that I really want to chat about is the idea of giving zero fucks. There’s been many books that have been released recently – I can think of other blog posts with titles like this, and espousing this idea that you really shouldn’t care about what others think. I think on the surface, this feels very empowering, but you have a more nuanced take on this. I’d love to hear you chat about that.
Andrea Owen: I do. Exactly, it’s nuanced. For the record, I have not read any of those books, but what I see is these inspirational memes and the general advice of giving zero fucks about what other people think. Again, on the surface, it’s a great sentiment.
But I think what ends up happening is people take it literally and they think ‘This is the self-help advice I need to run with, and I need to not care what anyone thinks’, and then that can in turn lead to isolation, which we talked about in the beginning.
The way I describe it is if you look at it like a spectrum, there are the people who literally give zero fucks, don’t care at all what anyone thinks, and joking aside, those people are sociopaths. It’s a mental health issue where they lack the ability to have any kind of human connection or empathy or compassion. My heart goes out to those people and the families of those people, because it’s a thing.
There are then people on the other side of the spectrum who give lots of fucks. They care what everybody thinks of them, even strangers. Sometimes these people are so afraid to put their art out into the world or start a new business or try to negotiate a raise or things like that because they are so afraid of being judged, of being criticised, of failing. And I think many people are raising their hand going ‘Yeah, that’s how I feel a lot of the time’.
What I’m asking people to do is be somewhere in the middle. You care about the opinions of the people that matter to you the most and really work on letting go of the rest of them. How many times have people said ‘Everyone will think I’m stupid’? I think many of us have said that. Who is everyone? Define your ‘everyone’.
I like to give people a little tiny square-inch box, or even a Post-it if you feel like you need that much room, and you write the names of the people in your life who you do care about what they think. It might be different areas of your life. Maybe at work you have a couple of people, at home you have a couple of people. But really, it’s about defining that and getting really clear on it.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. As I said, I think there is a more nuanced way of dealing with this, because otherwise at one end it becomes, as you say, very pathological. And I think it can lead to a number of the other habits that you talk about when you’re trying to not take on anyone else’s opinion or not let the world get to you, but doing it in this very forced way – versus the other end, where it almost feels like someone’s a teenager that’s never grown up.
Andrea Owen: Exactly. Can you imagine if your partner was like ‘I’m going to go and buy a motorhome and travel across the world and start my own circus, and I don’t give a shit what you think!’ [laughs] It’s like, okay, slow down. Can we have a conversation?
It’s really a matter of finding out, again, like I was saying, who are the people who you’ve built trust with over time? I do this exercise with clients and sometimes people say, ‘Is it okay if my mom is not on my list of people?’ I’m like, absolutely. Just because you’re related to your family members, doesn’t mean they’ve earned the right for you to really care and to take into account their opinions.
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Chris Sandel: Another one of the negative habits you talk about is imposter syndrome. Can you explain what this is? And can you also just talk about how it pertains to relationships? Because typically when I think of this term, I think of it very much from a work-centric place, but you talk about it much more generally than this.
Andrea Owen: The imposter syndrome – and I encourage anybody who’s just hearing about this for the first time in this conversation to do some research on it. There’s some really great books that are specifically about imposter syndrome. It’s also called the imposter complex. A lot of times, people’s minds are blown when they hear about it.
Chris Sandel: I’ve got a friend who I think is doing a whole thesis on it. When he finishes it, I’m going to invite him to come on the podcast and talk about it.
Andrea Owen: That’s good, because it’s so fascinating. The way I describe it, it is like a sister of your inner critic, but it’s more nuanced and specific.
What it typically looks like is for many people, they feel like a fraud. They feel like they don’t belong. They have thoughts like ‘When is everybody going to figure out that I have no idea what I’m doing?’ I have one story in the book that talks about a woman who works in a hospital, she’s a nurse in the ER, and she graduated at the top of her class, and she feels like all the other nurses are better than her. She feels like the weakest link among the team of nurses.
It’s that fear, again, that the gig is going to be up soon, everybody is going to turn to that person and say ‘you don’t belong here, what are you doing here?’ And a lot of times they give a lot of credit to other people. Like if they get some praise for something that they did, they’ll thank everybody else on their team or downplay it and say ‘Oh, I only did this part of the project’. They won’t take credit for it.
It’s really fascinating. The research that I’ve done – this might actually be changing now that it’s become more common to talk about. But the research I’ve done is that it seems to be more common in women. I heard a really interesting – I think it was on NPR somewhere. There was some research done that men will apply for a job if they can identify with 50% of the – oh gosh, what is the word I’m looking for? The things you need to do when you apply for a job. Help me, Chris.
Chris Sandel: Skills?
Andrea Owen: Maybe. So if they have about 50% of the skills needed to apply for the job, they will apply. Women will only apply for the job when they have all of the skills. That’s fascinating to me, and not surprising at the same time, to be honest. [laughs] I get excited when I talk about this. What was your exact question?
Chris Sandel: Explaining imposter syndrome, but also then looking at it from a relationship perspective.
Andrea Owen: Oh, that’s right. Thank you. Yes, it does happen a lot at work, like you said. But when I was gathering stories for this particular chapter, I had a couple of people tell me about in their relationships it was happening, and they were worried when their partner is going to realise – I think one woman said ‘I worry that he’s going to wake up one morning and realise how I’m not good for him and how I’ve just been pulling the wool over his eyes’ and things like that.
It’s fascinating that it happens over all different areas of our life.
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Chris Sandel: What are some solutions to this or some advice you would have to someone who identifies as dealing with that? And is there going to be different advice depending on if it’s work or if it’s relationships or some other area?
Andrea Owen: I think you can start small with this one and even work on, when somebody gives you praise or accolades or just compliments, pause. Probably your immediate response is to downplay it, etc., etc. It’s interesting; I even noticed that I was doing this when somebody would compliment my sweater or something, and I would say, ‘Oh my gosh, I got it at Target in the clearance centre’.
Chris Sandel: ‘Oh, that old thing?’ [laughs]
Andrea Owen: Yeah, ‘That old thing? I just pulled it off the floor’. I used to think it was just because I’m trying to tell people I got a deal on it, but what I was actually doing – and I know this now – is I was downplaying the whole thing and almost qualifying it or apologising and saying ‘This isn’t all that special, so therefore I’m not all that special. I know you like it, but I just want to tell you how inexpensive it was because I don’t want to make you uncomfortable thinking that I spent a lot of money’. It’s crazy things like that that we do that are many times completely in our subconscious that we don’t realise we’re doing.
So when someone pays you a compliment – ‘Hey, I like your sweater’ – say ‘Thank you’. That’s it. For some people, that can be a huge challenge. So I would start there.
Then jumping ahead on a bigger scale, a lot of times what this comes down to is the big ‘W’ word, and that’s worthiness. I wish that was something you and I could wrap up in 30 minutes, but it really comes down to a lot bigger topic. But it’s just something for someone to look into and work on, because it’s pretty meaty.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. One of the things I really like about you, and I do hope it’s coming across in this podcast, is you find this really nice middle ground. I do find so much of the self-help world nauseating, talking about the energy you put out into the world or the idea of getting rid of comparing yourself to others completely, like that’s even possible. I’m just wondering, if I was to go back to your blog when you first started out, would I be finding this overly optimistic ‘unicorns and rainbows’ type stuff? Or have you always had this nice balanced perspective?
Andrea Owen: No, it’s definitely the former. I shouldn’t generalise, but I think when many of us come out of life coaching school, we’re sort of oozing the ‘customer service’ of personal development. [laughs] We drank the Kool-Aid; we want everybody to drink the Kool-Aid. That’s really how it all started out for me.
Then I also really got into the law of attraction. To be honest, there are some aspects of the law of attraction that I can get on board with, but after a few years of studying it, I found some things that were just incongruent with how I felt and culturally, and if you’re talking about privilege and things like that, which I could not get on board with.
So I have shifted, and I talk about that in the introduction of the book and how sometimes life is shit. Life is hard, and it’s not that you have a bad vibration, it’s not that you were putting your focus on things wrong. Sometimes you get the diagnosis that you don’t want. Sometimes it is helpful to go out and peacefully protest things and things like that. But yeah, I definitely shifted and just paying attention again to what’s happening, not just in the world of spirituality and self-help, which I think can be very narrow-minded if we get stuck in that, but to pick your head up and look at what’s going on in the world. I think we have a responsibility to do that as well.
I think that answers your question. I don’t want to go off on a feminist tangent. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: It does. I’ve obviously found your work at some point much further along that journey, so I just wanted to find out if it was always like this or if you evolved quite strongly.
Andrea Owen: Definitely evolved. It’s been 11 years. And I’ve always told my audience that, like ‘Hey you guys, you’re all coming on a journey with me’. I’m never going to sit here and pretend to have it all figured out. I ask people, please don’t put me on a pedestal. I feel that people who get put on pedestals fall down very hard, and I’ve made missteps along the way. I have offended people and disappointed people. It’s just part of the process, and any time I have, I do my best to clean it up. Again, I’m always really clear with people that I’m learning too.
00:35:00
Chris Sandel: I remember a couple of years ago listening to a Brene Brown lecture, ‘The Power of Vulnerability’, which is on Audible, and I highly recommend people go out and listen. It’s her doing a seminar for like six hours, and it’s brilliant.
One of the things I remember her talking about was this idea of catastrophising. When I was then reading your book, you also mentioned it, and I think it’s a really interesting concept that not many people have thought about or maybe heard of. Are you able to explain what it is?
Andrea Owen: Yeah. Brene tends to refer to it as foreboding joy. I often refer to it also as like waiting for the other shoe to drop. What it looks like is any time something good or great happens in your life, you tend to immediately think of how it could go wrong. I often thought it was because I’ve always struggled with anxiety; I was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder and panic disorder in 2003. So I always thought that was just how my brain worked. But a lot of other people who even don’t struggle with anxiety do this too.
On a deeper level, if you go a few layers deep, what’s actually happening is that to lean into joy, to lean into love – these feelings and experiences and emotions that we make up, why would we ever want to move away from that? Isn’t that what we all want in our lives and to have it for dinner? Why would we even think about not leaning into that?
It’s a very, very vulnerable place to be in joy and love, etc., because we all know what it feels like to have that taken away, to be disappointed, to have expectations of something that don’t go how we want them to, especially when we have expectations of other people. That can be devastating, and those are life experiences that are painful.
So that’s what our brain tends to do. We also have a negative bias. That’s why the news looks the way it does. That’s why we slow down to look at car accidents. (I’m fascinated with brain science, too, by the way.) Brene actually says that in her research, she has found that joy is the hardest emotion to embrace. Again, it’s because we know exactly what that feels like to get it snatched away. She says in essence, we’re trying to beat vulnerability to the punch.
‘I already know what’s possible, the painful parts, so I’m just not going to lean into the love and the joy in order to protect myself’ is what’s essentially happening. That’s what catastrophising is.
Chris Sandel: How do you get past that? I would say you’d be hard-pressed not to have this happen at some point, but how do you deal with that?
Andrea Owen: It might sound cliché, but I think I need to say it anyway. The very, very first step is to notice that you’re doing it. I think that in and of itself is huge. They always say awareness is half the battle, and it’s very, very true with this particular habit. Notice that you’re doing it.
Then, when it feels like you’re able, pull back on the catastrophe that you are imagining or talking about and try your best to lean into the feelings of joy and happiness.
I know for me, it’s not these big moments. It’s not even every single night. It’s typically when I’m putting my daughter to bed. My son likes to go to bed on his own; he’s at that age. But my daughter is eight, and she still has us go in and tuck her in and kiss her. It’s when I’m hugging her – and for anyone that has a child or even someone they love very much, what is it about the smell of that person’s neck? It’s like their pheromones. I don’t know what it is, but just hugging her and smelling her and letting that in, I know oxytocin is released, and it’s that joy and that immense love.
And then I can start thinking about ‘Oh my gosh, how many more years of this do I have left? What’s she going to be like when she’s a teenager?’ Or even worse, ‘What if something bad happens to her?’ If I start to feel that, I will notice it and pull back and then maybe take another inhale in of her and allow myself – honestly, Chris, this is maybe 30 seconds, just 30 seconds of me enjoying this moment with her. That’s all. Those little moments will bring us joy, that release of oxytocin. The hormones start going, and that is joy, and that is love. And that can change your life.
Chris Sandel: What you’re describing there, they are the things that are actually bringing people happiness. When we think of what makes us happy, people will think of a wedding day or these big events or whatever, but it is those tiny little moments of interactions or connections with people.
I’ve got a question on my form of like ‘Describe your perfect day’, and it’s amazing how most people’s days are just really nice and mundane. It’s like ‘going for a nice walk with my partner, hanging out at the beach, eating a nice meal here or there’ or whatever. It’s those little things. So I can totally get when you’re describing just giving your daughter a hug, how that can be (a) so joy-filled but (b) then bring up the catastrophising if that’s your normal go-to.
Andrea Owen: What I’ve found helpful too is saying out loud – which is also a vulnerable moment – this just happened maybe a week ago, maybe just a few days ago. My husband burst out laughing about something. We were sitting on the couch and I said something that I didn’t think was that funny and he thought it was really funny, and he burst out laughing. It took me by surprise, and I think he hadn’t been feeling well – oh, he’s been working a lot. That’s what it was. So I feel like I haven’t seen him as much as I normally do.
I just was overcome, just for a moment, of how much I miss that sound, and just seeing him that happy for a moment in laughter like that – oh, forget it. Put that in a bottle and sell it and I will buy all of it. [laughs] And I told him in that moment. I was like ‘Oh my God, I love that, and I love you and I’ve missed you so much’. It’s taking that moment to have that vulnerable moment of saying ‘here’s how much I love you’.
I think it’s especially vulnerable and joyful when it’s out of the norm. Do you know what I mean? It’s not like we’re saying goodbye to each other or something like that. That to me is pure joy. The answer on your form, that’s my perfect day.
00:42:00
Chris Sandel: Something else I want to chat about and point people towards is your recovery series that you do with your podcast. Can you just explain what this is and also why you decided to do it?
Andrea Owen: You were mentioning the last time I was on, if anybody’s listened to that episode, I had just started it. Now we have two seasons of it. I got sober from alcohol in 2011. I also previously was a severe co-dependent, also had an eating disorder and was a love addict. Then I got sober from those things and then quickly my own drinking picked up, and I found myself really identifying as an alcoholic. I got sober shortly thereafter.
I have a podcast series where I’m interviewing women and all kinds of different stories. I have stories on there of women who went down and had a fairly low bottom, and I have a lot of stories of women who had a high bottom that it was more like my story. We didn’t get a DUI, we didn’t totally ruin and demolish our relationships, but we knew that we had a problem.
And it’s not necessarily even for people that identify with the word ‘alcoholic’. I’ve had guests on there more recently who don’t identify with it. They knew they just had a terrible relationship with alcohol and their life is better since they’ve been abstaining.
We’re seeing more and more people who are quitting for health reasons and finding that their life is so much better emotionally. Not just physically, but emotionally and mentally because they have cut alcohol out. So please don’t feel like the word ‘recovery’ holds you back. But it’s at yourkickasslife.com/recovery, and that’s where all the episodes are.
Chris Sandel: The part I really like about it – there was a number of things. You introduced me to Holly and Laura from the Home Podcast, and I really enjoy their podcast.
But what I found really useful is that people’s struggles with alcohol weren’t so much about alcohol. I work so much with women along the eating disorder and disordered eating spectrum, and I can send the podcast or that series to them and say, ‘Listen to this and basically any time someone makes reference to alcohol, just substitute your relationship with food in, and this will make complete sense’.
As you said, you’ve had lots of different issues, whether it be co-dependency, etc., and the other women as part of the recovery series have struggled with other things outside of alcohol. But I really like the series because I think there is some real universality to it and broadening out, outside of just the alcohol side.
Andrea Owen: Yeah. I totally agree with you. We numb out, and that’s a whole chapter in my book. We don’t like to feel feelings. I say ‘we’ because I could be the mayor of that whole town. Again, growing up in a family where I didn’t understand it at all, I definitely personally had the persona and wore it as a badge of honour, this identity of ‘I’m strong, I can power through this, feelings don’t solve problems’. That’s how I felt about it. I was not only uncomfortable with my own feelings, I was really uncomfortable with other people’s. I couldn’t be with my own, so I sure as shit couldn’t be with yours. And that’s not great for relationships. We need that skill in order to have connection.
So I’m with you. Food has never really been a thing for me. I kind of knock no wood because you never know. It might be for me. I’ve also had very messed up relationships with control and exercise and men. Men for a while were my drug, and it was kind of ugly there for a while. I half-joke that I left behind this littered graveyard of broken hearts, and my own heart was in there too.
So I love that you do that. You can just replace whatever it is that is your vice with alcohol.
Chris Sandel: It still makes complete sense because it’s just touching into, as you talked about, the numbing, but also the insecurities that we all have about feeling worthy or feeling enough, etc.
Andrea Owen: Yeah, totally. Oh man.
00:46:15
Chris Sandel: The final question I want to ask – and it ties into the final chapter in your book, which is around values and how this really connects it all together. Are you able to chat a little about that?
Andrea Owen: I joke that values is one of those things where they’re not that sexy. [laughs] A lot of people do values work if they work in a corporate setting and things like that, which I think is really great, but I want people to do values for themselves, their own personal values.
Really what it’s about is getting clear on what’s important about the way you live your life. Even if you just answer that question. Walk away answering that question from this episode: what’s important about the way you live your life? Then the question becomes, are you living that way? And if you’re not, please have some self-compassion, because most people when they start out doing this work realise that they’re not.
And all of the habits I talk about in my book are not in alignment with someone’s typical values. Someone might have a value around excellence, but they cross the line over into perfectionism. Some people might have a value around being of service, but they cross the line over into people-pleasing. That’s what I want to get people to get really clear on – not just naming their values, but what that actually looks like on a day to day basis, and also what that looks like when you are at a crossroads and something happens and you have to make a decision about the easy way.
For instance, if something’s happening at work and you need to say something – management is doing something awful and you need to have a conversation with someone – the easy way would probably be to ignore it or to quit your job and go work somewhere else and not have to talk about it. But the hard thing, and the thing that’s probably in alignment with your values, is to have a healthy, clear, honest, kind conversation and talk about it. That’s the hard work.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It was good when I was reading this, because this is actually something I do with clients, and fairly early on, looking at what’s your identity and what are your values, and seeing how those two things link in to one another.
I’ve done this exercise for myself, and I know when things in my life aren’t feeling right or I’m not feeling great, if I go and look at my list of values, I can normally find that some of those things aren’t stacking up. So it can just be a really useful step to start to see, ‘Why might I not be feeling so great? Okay, I can see I’m not in alignment with my values or my values don’t match up very well with my identity and that’s why I’m struggling’.
Andrea Owen: I call those your red flags, and for me, it’s any time I’m feeling snippy or short-tempered or passive-aggressive. That’s when I know something’s going on that I need to address, and it’s about values.
Chris Sandel: Andrea, I know you have another chat that you need to do coming up on the hour, so before we wrap this up, can you just tell people where they can find out more about you – website, social media, etc.? I’m going to put all this in the show notes.
Andrea Owen: Easiest place to find me is yourkickasslife.com. And I love to hang out on Instagram, so I’m at the same handle over there, @yourkickasslife. Come and say hi. I love to talk to people over there. Instagram is definitely my jam.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on the show again. Your work is something I regularly share with clients, so it’s nice to actually be able to chat with you and then create something together that I can share with them. You’re someone who is very easy to have a conversation with, so these are always nice.
Andrea Owen: Likewise. I always have fun talking to you, Chris. Thank you.
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